A reluctant Airport Authority to keep Braden open

Kevin Mingora, THE MORNING CALL

Aerial photo of Braden Airpark in Easton. After an 18-month review that considered selling or closing the small plane airfield, the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority decided Tuerday to keep running it.

Aerial photo of Braden Airpark in Easton. After an 18-month review that considered selling or closing the small plane airfield, the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority decided Tuerday to keep running it. (Kevin Mingora, THE MORNING CALL)

Over the past 18 months, the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority has considered selling Braden Airpark for commercial development, giving it to anyone willing to take on its debt and mothballing it to avoid the cost of improvements.

After all that often-heated debate, it ended right where it started: with the realization that the only thing it can afford to do it keep running it as the small plane airfield it's been since 1938.

The authority Tuesday formally ended its flirtation with selling the 72-acre Forks Township airfield where thousands of pilots have learned to fly. It voted to reject all the offers it took over the summer and disbanded the committee it created to review them.

Yet, even as authority board members appeared resigned to keep operating Braden, they noted that they'll continue exploring any option that will help it break even.

While pilots celebrated the end of the sales effort, the board's decision to leave the door open to close it — even a crack — left some worrying that the black cloud keeping other pilots and businesses from returning to Braden had not been removed.

The pilots who have been trying to save Braden are hoping they'll be the ones to step through that crack. They've already made several offers to buy or run the airfield among the many rejected, but a new one has surfaced that would seem to satisfy everyone.

In it, pilots are offering a 10-year lease-to-purchase agreement in which they'd pay a fee of say $45,000 a year to lease the airfield, while paying all or a portion of the $160,000 a year the authority pays on its $3 million debt service.

With help from Northampton County, they'd handle roughly $400,000 to $500,000 in capital improvements at Braden, get more pilots to base their planes and buy fuel there and recruit a flight school to open there.

At the end of 10 years, all that debt money they paid would be applied to their purchase, and the pilots would own the airport.

It would keep the property open as an airport to help reduce the authority's costs, but there's just one problem.

"It appears to violate IRS tax law," said authority Executive Director Charles Everett Jr. "There are provisions in the law that don't allow for a lease-to-purchase option of land that was bought with tax-free public bonds. We're having our bond counsel review it to see if there is any structure that can work."

Whether it's that plan or another, pilots' representative Robert Brown said the mere discussion, without the threat of Braden's closing, is an encouraging sign. If given the chance, whether it is by lease, purchase or a combination, Brown said he's convinced the pilots can make the struggling small plane airport viable.

"We can make this a profitable operation again," Brown said. "You're not going to be able to pay your debt service, but it was never intended to do that. We can make it operationally sound. I have no doubt."

The uncertainty over Braden rose as the authority decided in 2012 to consider selling off unnecessary assets to raise money to help pay off a $26 million court judgment against it for seizing a developer's land in the 1990s.

Braden was deemed to be an expendable asset as the board looked for a way to avoid at least some of the more than $200,000-a-year costs of keeping it open and the $500,000 in capital improvements needed in the next few years.

The board considered selling Braden, taking a $1.75 million bid from the pilots group and a $3 million bid from New Jersey developer J.G. Petrucci, who proposed closing it for business development.

But the pilots' offer wasn't enough for the authority to pay off its $3 million Braden bond debt, and while the Petrucci bid would have been enough to pay off that debt, it wasn't enough to repay up to $2.9 million in state grants that would have to be returned if the airport were shut down.

Ultimately, it could not afford to accept either offer. So for now, the authority board remains the reluctant operators of Braden and the pilots remain anxious to take that job off its hands.